Sometimes I think I want a soulmate. Not necessarily a boyfriend or anything like that, but a soulmate. I have a lot of people who complement me, balance me out, are obtuse to my acute--or vice versa if you like. But, sometimes, I want someone exactly like me, who can actually finish my sentences and not think they can and who's already put on the song I was aiming to play and who already has that restaurant in mind. Boy or girl it doesn't matter. Someone who wants to build a fort and crawl under it and watch movies and eat milk duds and popcorn. Somone who drinks lots and lots of coffee and who buys pretentious journals and then writes in them and who speculates about exercise but does it willy nilly. We would take a lot of polaroid pictures and arrange them in funny patterns and we'd have a favorite place and we'd have a litany of inside jokes like that place with the guy with the thing and the thing and hahahahahahaha. And somehow we wouldn't compete for attention. We wouldn't be interchangeable. You'd want both of us. And we'd ride around on a scooter together and our helmets would have headphones on the inside and we'd sing to the same song at the same volume. We'd always back each other up--we'd go down kicking and punching for each other. And sometimes we'd look back and remember (faintly, distantly, almost like a burp of food long since eaten) what lonely felt like, what lonely looked like, who lonely was. But it wouldn't last long.

I don't find my life particularly interesting these days. A lot of biking a lot of water a lot of people. I biked to a lake in the middle of the big forest in west Berlin and swam among many many naked people and had a good laugh and an even better swim and went home. I ate an enormous delicious hamburger. I drank a bunch of beer at a bar where, once upon a time, a lady fell down, but I wasn't there when it happened. I didn't get to say goodbye to a friend, and I'm still not sure why. On Saturday, I went to the north German shore, the Baltic Sea (i believe) and laid on the beach all day watching a sand frisbee tournament, throwing a little with my friend and sleepingsleepingsleeping. I'm reading A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius. For those of you who haven't read it: it's a little heavy at times. For those of you who have read it: it's heavy at times, huh? The end of Saturday brought a minor exhaustion/PMS/hunger-caused breakdown and I went home and slept it off. I like being alone in my apartment. I'm spending the rest of the summer at work figuring this Fulbright thing out and I've decided to go for it. Why not? My only concern is my sister and being away from her in a foreign country for so long. I don't want to repeat what my dad did. I don't know what I owe her and what I don't. August comes tomorrow. Everytime a new month arrives I do a mini self-evalution and move on. I have a short story I've been trying to finish for 5 months. I can't seem to give it any momentum. I like the idea of momentum. That energy adds to other energy and compels something to keep moving forward. A physics teacher would kill me for that definition, but I just like that idea that if you work hard enough, you can keep yourself moving. That's all I'm trying to do.